<p dir="auto">which is funny, sigh-inducing and normal. And certainly not a call to action (unless you don&#39;t get the infinite loop of it stirring you to action).</p>

<p dir="auto">and various observations:</p>

<p dir="auto">1) LaTeX is often deprecated by publishers in favour of Word because of lowest common denominators (that&#39;s how bad it is: you write in TeX then convert to RTF.) You want <em>that</em> world to make sense about markdown?<br>
2) For some reason, the world struggles on with Word, but then, the world tolerates all kind of things.<br>
3) People will use whichever version of markdown they like and sometimes hit snags. On the whole they will find it useful.<br>
4) If you want a developed nerdy version, we have multimarkdown (with honourable mentions to others on your page), which is good for us so we can do what we do. And if it doesn&#39;t, we discuss and sometimes we get or we get to know why not.<br>
5) If Gruber had decided to develop markdown further, he would be stuck on a mailing list debating fine points about double spaces at the end of line to produce an extra bit of whitespace, or annoying people by refusing to export to LaTeX and there&#39;s a guy who&#39;s written a script that does it but Gruber just broke it fixing the problem with footnotes attached to links so the entire community is up in arms all 177 of them and the rest of the world is using that broken version ohmygodhowdotheycope and Gruber is up late, and some of the markdown afficianados are annoyed because someone is wrong on the internet (<a href="http://xkcd.com/386/">http://xkcd.com/386/</a>) and daringfireball would have been fun, shame he stopped it because he was doing markdown, how is that going, what version is it at? Oh 5, cool, and he&#39;s talking about scripts to check dates automatically now but he&#39;s running very low on plain syntax so he&#39;s thinking of using unicode symbols but there&#39;s a row because even though you can get them easily on iPhones, you can&#39;t on Android so the fanbois of the word &#39;fanboi&#39; are offended and also ...</p>

<p dir="auto">I like Gruber on daringfireball, personally. I suspect he does too.</p>

<p dir="auto">We have multimarkdown. That&#39;s cool. Thanks Fletcher. And free or dead cheap (Composer). I can do all kinds of things then export to LaTeX. Cool bananas!:) This is what I dreamed of in the 90s with my Palm Pilot and a keyboard.</p>